Will Blog For Tips

February 27, 2005 By David Burn

Jason Kottke is an A-list blogger who recently quit his day job to pursue blogging full time. His revenue model of choice is the Pay Pal tip jar. Given the enormous traffic to his site, it may work.

According to Wired, Kottke is avoiding the ad-based revenue model because, as a one-man operation, there’s no easy way to neatly separate editorial and advertising.
“Advertising introduces a third party into the relationship between me and my readers,” Kottke said. “I don’t want to be doing things on my site that are geared more to advertisers than to readers.”
To me, this purist mentality seems misplaced, if not a tad crazy. Of course, it’s perfectly fine if one can afford it. I guess time will tell if Jason can indeed afford to turn his back on this most obvious (and in most cases, benign) source of blog revenue.

Filed Under: Blogs

About David Burn

I wrote my first ad for a local political candidate when I was 17. She went on to win her race, and I felt the power of persuasive copy for the first time. Starting in Portland in 1995, I worked my way across the country as a copywriter and eventually became a content director making media products for big packaged goods brands. I returned to Oregon in 2008, and now I focus on building brands for companies that matter, including this one.

http://1000blacklines.blogspot.com/ Matt Mulder

Great post. I’ve been following Kottke’s story as well. His strategy of utilizing a patronage system for financial support is particularly interesting amid a wealthy middle-class society, which doesn’t often patronize writers/arts (let alone bloggers) but does patronize movie theaters, restaurants and department stores.